Feast of Love’ has meager rations

Friday

Sep 28, 2007 at 6:00 AM

By Daniel M. Kimmel Telegram & Gazette Reviewer

“Love Actually” was a wonderful romantic comedy that came out a few years ago and intertwined several stories to good effect. Robert Benton’s “Feast of Love” is the opposite. Instead of comedy, we get tragedy. And instead of a celebration of love, we get a maudlin movie that makes you wonder if such relationships are worth it.

Our anchor is Harry (Morgan Freeman), who is in a long-term and loving relationship with his wife, Esther (Jane Alexander), but is, as we learn, among the walking wounded. A personal tragedy has led to him putting his teaching career on hiatus, and now he just goes around giving sage advice to others before withdrawing into his cocoon.

One such advisee is Bradley (Greg Kinnear), who runs the local coffee shop. Over the course of the film he will be betrayed by one wife (Selma Blair), who runs off with another woman; a sister who tries to keep the pet she was only supposed to be watching; and another wife, (Radha Mitchell), who can’t break off an affair she’d been having with a married man. “Unlucky in love” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Another advisee is Oscar (Toby Hemingway), who works in Bradley’s coffee shop. He falls hard for new employee Chloe (Alexa Davalos) even though he has to put up with his crazy and abusive father (Fred Ward). It’s not clear what the point is, or whether something was lost in the transition of Charles Baxter’s novel to the big screen. In spite of a ridiculously contrived happy ending that feels like a cheat, the real message of the movie seems to be that love is painful and doomed to failure, and you’d be better off getting a dog and living alone.